Friday, January 23, 2015

UFOs Over Jamaica

If you had an anti-gravity craft that could start, stop and change direction instantaneously and zip around at 1,200 mph, wouldn't you bop off to Jamaica every chance you got?

See a UFO? Who cares? It's Jamaica!

I confess I had never thought about this much until I was talking with my Jamaican friend Gxxxxxxx, and he mentioned that Jamaicans see UFOs all the time. Not only are UFOs sighted in Jamaican skies with astonishing frequency, he told me, there is no stigma whatsoever associated with reporting a UFO sighting in Jamaica. Because of this, no one is surprised when they hear a friend or neighbor or family member talk about seeing something strange in the sky. It's just a given that UFOs are real objects, and that anyone who reports seeing one is telling the truth.

Isn't that refreshing?

As comfortable as Jamaicans are with the idea of UFOs, however, they are dubious of alien abduction stories, my friend told me, especially those that originate in the U.S.

"Jamaicans call American UFOs 'gay UFOs,'" He said, laughing.

I didn't get the joke, so he explained: "The UFOs in the U.S. abduct people and put probes up their asses, so we say they're gay UFOs."

I started laughing then, too. Of course, that's not where aliens insert their probes -- at least not all of them -- at least I hope not -- but that's the way Jamaicans see it.

Anyway, that conversation got me thinking once again about how different cultures experience the UFO phenomenon... Last year I learned about how Turkish farmers experience entities that seem to be part UFO-part alien, and now I find that UFOs never abduct Jamaicans and insert probes into their bodily orifices -- "We don't play that way," joked my friend -- but rather save that particular treat for abductees in the U.S.

Did your Jamaican acquaintance describe the kind of UFOs observed there? Or any other aspects of their appearance?

The reason I ask is because the attitude of acceptance that you note in your post suggested to me that it would interesting to catalog and do some kind of cross-cultural "meta-study" of the variations in perception of the characteristics (such as shape, motion, color, "behavior," etc.) of UFOs seen in different regions and cultures world-wide in order to better parse or discriminate whether there are anthropological or cultural factors at work in how various peoples perceive UFOs, and how much of that variance may be due to either ethinic, regional, or other inherent demographic factors.

It might then be possible to better determine elements of differing UFO sighting reports and witness recollection that might then by tied to those regional and demographic differences, as a way of potentially being able to distinguish between what variables in sightings might be related to "psycho-social" influences vs. the possibility that some UFO incidents may be forms of "staged displays" (as per Vallee), tailored, as it were to differing cultures and their general political, educational, and other influences within the different cultures involved in any such study.

I remember reading (but I can't recollect the sources for this, dammit) that the largest percentage of alien abduction reports comes from the U.S., and that alien abduction is a relatively rare event in the rest of the world.

If that's true, rather than aliens being obsessed with the U.S. because we're so all that, it might instead mean there's a strong socio-cultural influence here that predisposes us to believe we're being abducted by aliens. And you have to admit, Americans' alien abduction stories for the most part have a sexual (straight or gay) component to them.